How to improve clickthrough rates (CTR) in Adwords?

7 Answers

All the above answers are correct (or partially). Don't be distracted too much from CTR tho, it's important for the Quality Score, but try to focus more on landing page experience, call to actions on web site, page speed, and have attracting and catchy offers to increase number of conversions. You make money from conversions, not from CTR.

The best way to increase CTR on your Google Ads (or any ads for that matter) can be broken down into:

1. Research - Look at things like: Target Demographic for the product, typical keywords associated with this product, typical needs of your target demo who purchase this product.
Once you know these basics, you can move onto number 2.

2. Address - What I mean by Address is to address your target demographic in a way that gives an emotional response.
It's easy to get your ad seen by someone, but you need to peak their interest by asking them a question, including curiosity (what else can this do), or pinpoint their pain point and work it.
If you can catch the eye of your target demo, you will increase your clicks while reducing your views (more targeted approach means reduced viewers with increased clicks).

You need to target perfect audience with exact match keywords, Geo locations, Add Negative keywords, Attractive headlines & Descriptions.
For display Network ads you need to place your ads on targeted sites, blogs, Geo, Keywords, User interest and online behaviour, Gender so that you ad will be shown to right audience and it will definitely help you to get better CTR

Click through rates (CTR) can be increased by having compelling ad copy (readers wanting to know more using bait techniques) for your keywords. However, what you may need to be careful is how your increased CTR is working positively to your conversion goals. The best strategy is to identify use cases falling under a specific keyword, and ensuring we have separate ads with excellent ad copy (read content) specific to the use cases in one ad set. Google, for instance, would automatically prioritize the ads that are getting more CTR - this way you can be sure which use cases are largely working in favour to you.

With these 8 tips in mind you're ready to kick some serious %CTR. Start by using something basic like implementing sitelinks, using keywords in your Ad copy, a full stop after description line 1 and keep going from there.

Increasing %CTR is something that requires disciplined tests and not necessarily something that can be achieved overnight so I urge you not to give up if your first tries fail - trial and error is a part of becoming a true master of the art of PPC. Keep in mind that because %CTR plays a big role in quality score calculations it affects your ROI which is another great reason why you should not ignore this metric.